


White Note

by esama



Category: Death Note
Genre: Alternate Universe, Dubious Morality, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-03
Updated: 2014-01-03
Packaged: 2018-01-07 07:46:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,594
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1117329
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/esama/pseuds/esama
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>At the age of five, L came upon a Death Note</p>
            </blockquote>





	White Note

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on fanfiction.net on 04/05/2009  
> Proofread by Darlene and Tsuyu

"The earliest memory I have is of my mother's death," L spoke without looking up, instead opting to stare at the piece of cake before him, prodding it with his fork as if unsure if it was safe to eat or not. "I was… young then. Almost four years old. I can't really remember what we were doing or where we were going, only that we were on a street and that I let her hand go for a moment… and then she was dead."

"Accident?" the other asked.

"Cardiac arrest," the black haired man answered flatly and finally cut a piece of his cake with the fork. Balancing the fork delicately between his thumb and forefinger, he stared at it. "It was instant, so fast that it wouldn't have helped even if she had been in the hospital at the time. Well, I didn't know it then, but I read about it later on from her file… once I was old enough to know how to hack into medical databases and so forth."

There was a momentary silence as the other leaned back in his chair, hands folded and a thoughtful look about his face. "Was it… natural?"

"It seemed to be, at the time. Normal heart attack, no chemicals involved… nothing to it. Of course, this being a good twenty years before _Kira_ 's appearance… no one really had any reason to think that a natural heart attack could be unnatural," L trailed away and bit into the cake he’d cut. "It didn't even matter at the time. And she was a nobody – worked the morning shift in a café, lived in a small house, was a single parent, had no other surviving family… She was an immigrant too. Nobody important."

"Immigrant?" the other asked, but as L said nothing about it, he let it slide. "What happened to you after your mother died?"

"What usually happens to kids with no parents. I went to an orphanage," L answered, glancing at the other briefly before turning his attention to the cake again. "It was the first of two orphanages I lived in, the worse one. Small, with too many children and too little staff – their funding wasn't exactly stellar either but they survived. I was… not well liked there, but that's nothing unusual. I had just lost my mother, I was a few steps ahead in terms of intelligence compared to kids six years older than me, and I preferred not to play around much…"

He was quiet for a moment, his face not giving any hint of what he might be feeling, remembering. "Anyway. I turned four and eventually five in the orphanage. It was the summer when it happened, when I was forced more or less to run away from the orphanage."

"What?" the other asked with surprise. "You ran away?"

"Was forced to – bullies, simply enough. I ran away to hide, figuring that I could use a moment of peace and quiet, a moment away from the noise of the orphanage," L made a dismissive motion. "It's not important. What is, is the fact that I almost got killed."

The man cut another piece of the treat before continuing. "Annie Brady. You wouldn't know about her. I didn't either at the time, but I heard about her afterwards in the news. She was a serial killer who targeted kids on the streets. Homeless kids mostly. She either killed them on the spot with a knife and left them there, or took them with her to kill them slowly elsewhere… Anyway, I ran into her while I was running from the orphanage."

The other raised a single eyebrow at him. "You obviously didn't die," he said.

"No, I did not. She did almost get me with the knife she was carrying, but before she could do any damage at all she died," the detective stopped for a moment to swallow another piece of cake. "Heart attack," he then added as a way of explanation.

"Convenient," the other raised both his eyebrows this time.

"Extremely," L agreed. "I found it almost immediately after she fell to the pavement – it fell beside me to the ground, along with a pile of sand… the notebook." He glanced at the notebook sitting on the table. "Thankfully, I’d been too shocked to move, otherwise I would've ran away and missed it."

"A _Shinigami,_ " the other muttered.

"I don't know what made me do it. I suppose I was too confused about it all, but I grabbed the notebook and then I ran, straight back to the orphanage," the detective continued. "I didn't know what it was or what it did – to me it seemed to be just an ordinary notebook. All I knew was that I had it, and for the longest time I hadn't had anything that was _mine_ … Not many kids in the orphanage had anything that they owned, and if they did, the bigger kids ended up stealing them. So wanting to keep the book to myself was natural…"

"But you figured out later what it was, didn't you?"

L didn't answer for a moment before reaching out to take his tea cup and taking a sip from it. "I accidentally killed a boy with it," he answered, and now his voice wasn't as monotonous as it usually was – it had a darker undertone. "The boy had bullied me and I wanted to, hm, vent what I felt. Writing it down seemed like a good way to do it, so I wrote in the notebook like it was a journal… I wrote his name down.”

"And he died," the other said, now frowning.

"I didn't mean to kill him, of course, but I realised that I had pretty quickly. I wrote down that I wished he got sick and left me alone, and a few days later the boy died due to an unnaturally high fever… The result was too close to what I had written for me not to believe," the man was quiet for a moment. " Perhaps not the best thing a child so young could have experienced."

"I can only imagine the mental scarring," the other muttered.

"Hm-hmm," the dark haired man nodded without looking up from his tea. "I had nightmares and ended up missing sleep because of them; and eventually, in order to avoid sleeping, I distracted myself. I read all the storybooks and newspapers in the orphanage and taught myself calculus… things like that," he took another sip of the tea and placed the cup down. "Six months later, I was approached by a representative from another orphanage who wanted me to live there. An orphanage for gifted, intelligent children. More of a school than an orphanage, really."

There was a moment of silence as L turned to his cake again. "I was pretty young when I started to work as a detective. At first, it was anonymous, my giving aid to various police forces via the internet and so forth. Very soon the hobby developed into an occupation, and when I was fourteen I was already a bit of a sensation… The anonymous, mysterious detective L. And later Eraldo Coil and Deneuve when the identity of L didn't suit the case…"

"Did you use the Death Note again?" the other asked.

"I did. The second time I used it was when I was fourteen. It was a case I simply didn't have time for – I was too busy with a more pressing case – but one I wanted solved nonetheless. It was a pedophile and serial murderer who targeted young girls… A quite abominable individual who escaped from prison. The sort of case I wanted to solve for the victims and not for the case itself – because honestly, the criminal in question wasn't intelligent enough to avoid capture for long… But, like I said, I didn’t have the time."

"So you used the Death Note."

"Yes. I wrote down that he would be found by the police, that he would resist capture, and eventually pull out a weapon so that the officers would have no choice but to shoot him in self-defence. I wasn't sure if it would work, but… it did." L was quiet for a moment. "After that, I've used the note similarly in fifty seven separate cases."

"Did you always have the police shoot them?" the other asked curiously.

"Of course not. Some I had commit suicide after capture and others I had executed… and I admit, I preferred suicide," the man frowned and lowered his spoon. Then he lowered his hands to grasp his ankles. "I think I thought in some way that I was doing the right thing, that I could use the book for justice. I was still solving the cases while using the book every now and then, so it seemed balanced and even fair – and I only used the book on the worst of murderers. Sometimes I did entertain the thought of using the book in a similar manner as _Kira_ uses his, but…"

The other man was quiet, watching as the detective's knuckles turned white. "Was it the trauma of using the book for the first time?" he asked almost softly.

"Possibly," L said, his fingers biting into the fabric of his pants before looking up at the other. "Or maybe I simply wasn't heartless enough. Either way, using the book was never easy for me. I couldn't justify it to myself… not like you can."

Yagami Light smiled grimly. "Was that an insult or a compliment?"


End file.
